Tuesday, April 17, 2012

false consciousness - recycled

A post I am recycling from 2007

We all know that false consciousness can be manufactured by
the yard, like ribbon. We have merely to pick up a newspaper or see a movie to
confirm this belief. In fact, the most popular story about false consciousness,
Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’ New Clothes, uses thread as the emblem
of false consciousness – for in its essence, false consciousness is that
nothing at all for which someone gets paid. And haven’t we seen them sewing the
invisible thread? What was Tarp, what was the Iraq war, but the work of the
tailors? Who wove justifications through which it was quite easy to see – it
was quite easy to see that Iraq, a country that had been crippled by ten years
of sanctions, couldn’t even properly attack its breakaway Northern half, much
less threaten a power that spends more on the military each year than the rest
of the world spends in five years. Just as it was quite easy to see that the
middle and working class, hit by a business cycle that had been put in motion
by the financial sector, were going to pay the people, pay them richly, who had
caused the disaster, all in the name of an essential function that they had not
performed in years, and have no plans to perform in the future: moving capital
into venues productive of the social good.

11,000 14,000

The problem is that false consciousness implies true
consciousness, but who manufactures it? Or are we to assume that it isn’t
manufactured at all? The Anderson tale indicates this problem as well, but only
on a more subtle level.In the second
paragraph of the story we read:

“In the great city where he [the
Emperor] lived, life was always gay. Every day many strangers came to town, and
among them one day came two swindlers. They let it be known they were weavers,
and they said they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not
only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this
cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his
office, or who was unusually stupid. “

The term “swindlers” is the tell. True consciousness has
already been woven into the cloth of the story – we, the reader and the author,
have a wonderful way of seeing the tailors for swindlers, and the empty looms
for empty looms. Thus, when the little boy proclaims that the emperor is naked,
he is saying something that we already knew.

“Small Zaches”, has never achieved the popularity of
Anderson’s tale. It is not one of the E.T.A. Hoffman stories that has entered
the vocabulary of all mankind, or at least the part of it that occasionally
goes to the opera. But it tackles a more difficult matter than Andersen’s
story: what if we tell the story of false consciousness by putting the ‘tell’
in doubt?

The plot of the story concerns a dwarf. The dwarf is Small
Zaches. He is a snarling, barely civilized creature. He does possess an unusual
gift, however. He projects upon the people around him the impression that he is
another thing altogether – named Zinnobar. Zinnobar is not simply a projection
– rather, it is a projection collector. If a man at the table with Small Zaches
reads a beautiful poem, the poem is attributed by those at the table to the
dwarf, not the poet. Meanwhile, the dwarf’s habits- say, of sticking his face
into his plate and licking up the food on it -will be attributed to the poet. The shifts produce the humor in the
tale: Zinnober is introduced to the Furst, but merely mumbles and growls at him
while smearing food over himself. The Furst congratulates the little monster on
a memo he has received. A courtier comes forward and claims that he has written
the memo – and we know he has, because the authorial p.o.v. makes us know that
he has.But the Furst gets angry at the courtier not only for his false claim to
authorship, but for eating like a pig, smearing food on himself, and dropping a
piece of melted butter on the Furst’s uniform.Like children, we laugh at this – or at least I laugh at this – because
I know that the true version of events is the one told to me by the author. He,
at least – this anonymous, organizing voice – has a true consciousness of the
events that are unfolding in the tale.

Yet
this same author calmly describes magical metamorphoses in other parts of the
tale, with the same sense that this material happened as it is described. Meanwhile,
in one of those strokes of mad genius to which Hoffmann is heir, even his hero,
Balthazar, who sees through Zinnober to the Small Zaches inside, has moments of
doubt – while Zinnober’s most ardent defender, the advocate of enlightenment,
and the man whose daughter wants to marry him, Professor Mosch
Terpin,
experiences moments when his eyes deceive him – that is, moments when he sees
clearly: “ It is true that it often seems inconceivable even to me that a girl
like Candida could be so foolishly fond (vernarrt sein) of the little man.
Otherwise, women mostly are looking for a handsome exterior, than for
particular intellectual gifts, and when I look at the special little man for a
while, it begins to seem to me as if he were not at all pretty, but even a
humpy… st …. St…be still, the walls have ears. He is the favorite of the Furst,
always climbing higher. Higher, and he is my future son-in-law.”

But
it is Balthasar, who makes the most uncanny confession. Balthasar is one of our
anchoring characters, whose perspective, vis a vis the truth about the special
little man, is the author’s own. He hates the special small man precisely
because Candida loves him (and it is here that Balthasar and the author part
ways, so to speak – Balthasar’slove
for Candida, it is made abundantly clear, is itself based on a fundamental
delusion in which he confuses his sexual excitement about her for some merit
she herself possesses – when we can see she is vain and rather empty). But
there he is, sitting in the forest (which represents the anti-entlightenment by
its very existence – and yet also represents the place where projection is
neutralized) at the beginning of chapter four,making a confession:

No, he cried out as he sprang
from his perch and with glowing glances looked into the distance, “no, all hope
has not yet vanished! – it is only too certain that some dark secret, some evil
magic has broken into my life, but I will break this magic, even if it kills
me! – as I finally fled, overcome by the feeling that my breast would explode
unless I confessed my love to gracious, sweet Candida, didn’t I read in her
look, feel by the press of her hand, my blessedness? But when that damned
mishmash was seen, it was to him that all the love flowed. On you, execrable
misbirth, hung Candida’s eyes, and longing sighs flew from her breast, when the
clumsy boy came near her or touched her hand. … Isn’t it fantastic, that
everyone mocks and laughs at the completely helpless, misshapen little man, and
then again, when the small man slips in between, cry him up as the most
intelligent, learned, even handsome Studioso among us?– What am I saying? Doesn’t it come over me
in the same way, as if Zinnobar were clever and pretty? Only in Candida’s
presencedoes the magic have no power over
me: then is and remains Mr. Zinnober a dumb, dreadful mandrake!”

Who does not feel these
terrible moments of surrender to the sly devil’s voice of the consensus omnium?
And must projection drive out projection and so on, without end?

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.